why aren't clojure strings of type clojure.string?

Question

Just curious on why a string in Clojure isn't of type clojure.string, and instead is java.lang.String. It seems a bit odd that I need to require clojure.string to access the native Clojure string functions?

Answer 1

Because java.lang.String is immutable and doesn't break interoperability with Java. The functions in clojure.string can be mostly considered as a convenience layer on top of already existing functionality in the JDK and/or clojure.core.